Industrial bread production refutes Christianity more than rationalist critique does.

Evidence

Peasants at the time of the English Revolution had a life experience of the land and the seasons that was probably not very different from that of the characters of the Old Testament (or of the New Testament either); it is no wonder it was still possible for them to stage their revolution in biblical terms and to conceptualize it in theological categories. That possibility no longer exists for a nineteenthcentury bourgeoisie within a life-world of factories and artificial streetlights, railroad trains and contracts, representative political institutions and telegraphs: what can stories about pastoral peoples dressed up in exotic costumes possibly mean for such modern Western men and women? A modernist hermeneutic then intervenes to save the day: the biblical narratives, including the gospel itself, are no longer to be taken literally — that way Hollywood lies! They are to be taken figuratively or allegorically and thereby stripped of their archaic or exotic content and translated into existential or ontological experiences, whose essentially abstract language and figuration (anxiety, guilt, redemption, the “question of being”) can now, much like the “open works” of aesthetic modernism, be offered to a differentiated public of Western city-dwellers to be recoded in terms of their own private situations. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 835 (#expands, via linked claim)

Religion, to the henceforth “religiously unmusical” subjects of the market system, is the unity of older social life perceived from the outside: hence its structural affinity with the image as such and hallucination. Religion is the superstructural projec­ tion of a mode of production, the latter’s only surviving trace i:h the form of linguistic and visual artifacts, thought systems, myths and narratives, which look as though they had something to do with the forms in which our own consciousness is at home, and yet which remain rigorously closed it. Because we can no longer think the figures 242 P O L I T I C A L U N C O N S C I O U S of the sacred from within, we transform their external forms into aesthetic objects, but also monuments, pyramids, altars, presumed to have an inside, yet housing powers that will forever remain a mystery to us. — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 6154 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Biblical literalism died when industrialization severed life-experience from agrarian reality — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 835; Blind faith in rational progress has become a theology as punishing as biblical religion; Religion represents the superstructural projection of earlier modes of production — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 6154

Broader Connections

• Biblical literalism died when industrialization severed life-experience from agrarian reality #expands (0.88) — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 835
• Religion represents the superstructural projection of earlier modes of production #complicates (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 6154
• Blind faith in rational progress has become a theology as punishing as biblical religion #complicates (0.75)